The twenty-seventh in a series of posts where we bring to you the most interesting and stimulating music articles we found this week.
Insane Clown Posse: And God Created Controversy by Jon Ronson (The Guardian): If you haven’t already read this article – it’s been all over the internets! – now is the time. Jon Ronson has made a career of interviewing odd people and uncovering “I can’t believe that is actually true” stories – he wrote the book
The Men Who Stare At Goats, about the US army’s experiments with the paranormal. So he’s the perfect person to interview the Insane Clown Posse, because, well, he has a lot of experience in dealing with paranoid and delusional narcissists. The whole juggalo phenomenon is perplexing, and in a subtle but effective way Ronson gets at why Insane Clown Posse and their fans are what they are – they are representatives of the American underclass, lashing out in pain at a world that has no sympathy for them.
Steve Albini, Thurston Moore, And The Spectrum Of Indie Belief by Eric Harvey (Marathon Packs): So, you might remember the GQ article with Steve Albini I posted last week, where he lashed out at Sonic Youth for selling out to a major label and then acting as talent scouts to lure other good bands away from indies? Eric Harvey looks at the actual history of Sonic Youth, and finds that their (interesting) story is not so black and white. Albini wants to make a distinction between capitalist major labels, and indie labels that are an expression of real culture, and Harvey argues here that this is not the case. Indie labels are run by capitalists, of course – it costs money to put records out, and if you want to keep doing so for any period of time and avoid going bankrupt, your record label is basically a capitalist business – and Sonic Youth, and plenty of other 80s bands, had the same complaints about dodgy accounting practices that bands on major labels do.
Looking To A Sneaker For A Band’s Big Break by Ben Sisario (New York Times): Perhaps the best example of why Albini has lost the argument about indie capitalism, for better or worse, is an article like this. Some of today’s cool indie bands – Best Coast - are now not only getting corporate sponsorships from brands like Converse, but are beginning to make music put out on corporate record labels, which often have more resources and money behind them than actual major labels. This is the full extent of how much indie music has changed since the 1980s, when Albini formed his beliefs about the independence of music. The last sentence in the article: “We just made something that is a fun song,” [Beth Cosentino of Best Coast] said, “that will hopefully make people dance around in their Converse during the summer.” And yes, if that quote makes you a little nauseous, you’re not alone. I hope it helps pay her rent.
Boat People Tour Diary: The Waiting Game by Robin Waters (Mess+Noise): Former Hummingbird and rock and roll sage Simon Holmes once told me that the essence of rock and roll is “hurry up and wait”, and it is astonishing to me that there aren’t more bands with songs about waiting around. Judging by his tour diary, Robin Waters, the keyboard player in Brisbane indie pop band The Boat People, would agree. Waters turns out to be a perceptive and thoughtful writer; his tour diary gives you a pretty good idea of all the good and bad bits of being in an indie band called The Boat People on tour in Australia (during the recent election, as it happens).
Why We Fight #8 by Nitsuh Abebe (Pitchfork): So I think we all know by now that Kanye West is a bit of a self-obsessed prick. I mean, Imma let you finish, and all that. But the thing with Kanye being a bit of a self-obsessed prick is that we’re fascinated by how much of a self-obsessed prick he is. This may be because we’re all a bit self-obsessed in this postmodern world of social media and promotion and all. And it is this personal brand – Kanye as a self-obsessed prick - rather than his music per se, which is now commercially valuable, and so Kanye can upload new tracks on Twitter for free and it doesn’t matter so much, because he makes his money by being himself, not by selling CDs and downloads.
Chacona, Lamento by Alex Ross (The Rest Is Noise): It’s probably occurred to you recently that some song sounds like some other song – for example, that the Custom Kings’ “Sunday” sounds a little like Panda Bear’s “Bros”. Of course, “Bros” itself sounds like some other song (The Beach Boys, probably), which sounds like some other song itself (Chuck Berry). And the fascinating thing Ross does here is look at one of these chains of influence, to show the line of descent between Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed And Confused” and a sixteenth century dance craze, the chaconne, imported from South America.
The Strange Universe Of Science Fiction Novelty Records by Charlie Jane Anders (io9): You may be aware, if you have ever seen footage of sci-fi conventions (or, if you’re geeky enough, you have ever been to one!), that the world of science fiction television has a large amount of dedicated, obsessed fans. As a result, there is a fascinating musical subgenre of science fiction novelty records. “These fans are crazy! They’ll buy anything!” cry the shameless record executives! And so plenty of cash-in exploitation records that have attempted to appeal to these fans, from the famously bad William Shatner cover of “Rocket Man” to Weird Al Yankovic’s “Yoda” (to the tune of the Kinks’ “Lola”) to 1960s exploitation classic “I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek” by The Go-Gos (no, not the Belinda Carlisle Go-Gos).
Please Omit Music – Or Else by Terry Teachout (Wall Street Journal): You might remember a time when your mum banned you from listening to NWA or Marilyn Manson or Metallica. But that doesn’t compare at all to Ayatollah Khomeini, who has banned all music from Iran. Now, thinking all music should be banned isn’t so new: the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought music causes “a relaxation of the intellectual faculties, and [debases] the warrior into an effeminate slave, destitute of all nerve and energy of soul” (and, considering your average stereotypical hipster, I see his point). People like the Puritans in the US tried to ban music too. After all, music is powerful and hard for dictators to control. What Teachout misses here, because he’s not an ethnomusicologist, is that definitions of music change in different societies – what I call music, a Papua New Guinea tribesman might call noise. And the Farsi (Iranian) word for music is better translated as “secular music” – as far as Khomeini is concerned, hymns sung at mosques don’t count as music. But still.
Tim Byron